You could probably pick up a used Patriot PBO box for cheap these days. When powered and USB connected is is easy to copy media to the hard drive.
I like the multiple mechanisms of video / audio output. Remote is medium sized; not too big or too small.
It is very low powered and with a little firmware update the media tank gui works fine.
I have not problems with it using the old fashioned Microsoft Media player IR remote control with it today.
I did configure a Kodi box for a relative who found it a bit too complicated such that I replaced it with an old media tank (Patriot PBO). Basically it just boots up to a menu with all of the media content. That is as complicated as they wanted it It has analogue video out, RGB and HDMI outputs.
I use KODI today on the LCD televisions. Here utilize AOpen digital engines with meat (CPU/Memory) running KodiBuntu connected Gb to the main network. Each also have one SATA drive which I use sometimes for local temporary storage.
Plex and Emby will do transcoding just fine and the eye candy is nice with these two applications.
I don't understand about KODI being ugly to use nor see any difficulty with the navigation. You can do anything with it theme wise these days for nothing (free). You can also very easily create a propietary playback only theme in about 5 minutes.
While XBMC / KODI was slow with the RPi; it is fine today with the RPi2 (but I do not utilize it). One of the original goals of the RPI was the installation of XBMC and making it work. (similiar to the old video processing contests of yesteryear with the AMD versus Intel thing).
If you want small / AMD and expandible you can purchase one of these today for way less than $100 refurbished. It is a tad larger than an RPi Arm based computer. These two will run circles around any Arm / Android based mini computer.
They will run Windows 10, Android or Linux (KodiBuntu would be my preference).
The above noted; probably would be easier just to get an Android tablet / Windows tablet and use that with whatever media you want on a usb stick. Just noticed this past weekend that my daughter connected a tablet to your exercise machine and watches streaming / live TV with that set up. Personally I like to watch and enjoy my media content on something larger than a telephone or tablet; that is me though.
Googling this morning found a cheap media tank for $39.51/ free shipping with all of the bells and whistles. Looks just like the one you purchased from Amazon for $35. I did find yours for around $27/free shipping. I like that it supports an internal drive; well similar to the Patriot PBO (well modded by a bunch of EU folks a few years back).
I have no idea about the firmware / GUI on it.
- Model: J-03
- Plastic housing material
- Full HD 1080P media player
- Supports 2.5" internal SATA HDD up to 1TB; external SATA/IDE HDD up to 2TB
- Supports NTSC/PAL composite video
- HDMI 720P, 1080P video output
- Supports USB flash drive, Plug & Play
- Supports SD card up to 32GB
- Supported video formats: RMVB/RM(RV8/9). H.263, H.264(MOV/MP4/M4V), MPEG1/2(VOB), MPEG4(XVID/DIVX), WMV7/VC-1, MKV, AVI, TS/TP, VOB, PMP, FLV
- Supported audio formats: MP3/WMA/AFE/FLAC/OGG/APE/AAC/AC3/DTS
- Image formats: JPEG/GIF/BMP/PNG (supports picture zoom out/rotation and auto-play)
- Interface: SD/MMC + USB + YPbPr + AV + HDMI + VGA
A bit ago we rented a 3 bedroom log cabin in the middle of nowhere which was nice. It had a large fireplace and large 4 person hot tub inside plus a 60" LCD TV. While we didn't really watch much TV; I did bring the Patriot Media tank and it worked just fine with the LCD TV.